Leisure jobs: Recreating family and social life in Canadian electric utility marketing, 1920–1970

Abstract

<h2>Abstract</h2> This paper contributes to debates of how technological and cultural change occurs in sociotechnical transitions. I this research I apply concepts from contemporary management theory to a historical case study to make two contributions. The first is to understand historical energy transitions in a new way. The second is to show how marketing and business model innovation theory can be used to examine utility marketing practices and understand how utilities help shape changes in family and social practices. The empirical case study is framed in the context of the seemingly contradictory views about technology and housework in the twentieth century. One view is that the transformation of homes with electric power created more work for mothers as they used their appliances to achieve new standards of cleanliness and devote more time to child care. The other is that it was beyond dispute that clothes dryers saved time and that over the twentieth century, women performed fewer hours of housework and family care. To investigate the issue and more generally technological and cultural change, I examined how electric power utilities in Canada conceptualized the use of domestic customer time during scale up of the grid. The research question asks what values and jobs to be done were marketed by electric utilities during the period, beyond giving homemakers more time to run the house and more money to shop? Utilities initially sought to grow by selling power as capital and labour rationality, mirroring industrial ideals of producing more with fewer resources. As those labour savings were realized, they increasingly sold power as a means to perform the new organizational and emotional jobs of creating a more intimate, happier and child-centred family life and a more entertaining social life. In doing so, they contributed to a redefinition of family and social life, from family-as-labour to family-as-leisure. Future research builds on this historical study in applying jobs to be done, business model innovation and social tableaux frameworks to understand contemporary marketing as it seeks to realize decarbonized power grids, expansion of electricity into mobility and heating markets and changed social practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.